Panthera
Panthera is, according to the Talmud, the name of a certain soldier, said to have been illegitimately the father of Jesus. This tradition was current before the composition of the Talmud, for as early as the 2d century Celsus, against whom Origen wrote his treatise, introduces a Jew who, in speaking of the mother of Jesus, says that "when she was pregnant she was turned out of doors by the carpenter to whom she had been betrothed, as guilty of adultery, and that she bore a child to a certain soldier named Panthera." The word Panthera, or, as it is written in the Talmud, בו פנדירא, Son of Pandera, seems to have been used in an allegorical sense, meaning "the son of a wanton," for according to allegorical exegesis the panther derives the name from τὸ πᾶν θηρᾶν, thus signifying "the personification of sensuality." Only in unexpurgated editions of the Talmud, the last of which appeared at Amsterdam in 1645, the name of Jesus occurs some twenty times. The Toledoth Jeshu (q.v.), a detestable compilation put together out of fragmentary Talmudic legends, contains everything that is supposed to have been uttered by Jewish blasphemers, and in, the Latin translation given by Wagenseil, in his Tela Ignea Satance (Altorf, 1681), it is made accessible to all who wish to know more about this matter. In the German language the student can peruse Eisenmenger, who has brought together all these blasphemous sayings, attributing them all to Judaism, while really they are only the utterances of several ignoble souls. In his Entdecktes Judenth. 1:106,107,109,115,116, 133, 261 sq., the German and the original are given. See also Buxtorf, Lexicon Talmudicumri, s.v. סטד, סטדא, p. 73-2 and s.v. פנדורה, p. 874 (Fischer's ed.); Hoffmann, Das Leben Jesu nach den Apokryphen, p. 90 sq.; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:76; Nitzsch, Ueber eine Reihe talmudischer undpatristischer Tauschungen welche sich an den missverstandenen Spottnamen, בן פנדירא , geknupft, in the Theologische Studien ut. Kritiken (1840), p. 115 sq.; P. Cassel, Panthera-Stada, etc., in his Apologetische Briefe (Berlin, 1875). (B. P.)
